Sunday 25 February 2018

50 shades of white


I am a little behind on blogging as I've just celebrated another year around the sun, (32 now, eek!) spent a little time in London shooting some London Fashion Week shots, caught up with outstanding retouch work for others and worked on my own selfie ideas outside of the challenges.. (like selfie-ing myself from the loo, see last post!) so I have quite a bit to write up.. some stuff which worked well, and other stuff which was quite horrific.

So back to WEEK 6 of my friend's challenge (from 3 weeks ago now) and the theme was '50 shades of white' - to try incorporate as many whites into an image as possible.

So I did.. I just had a new white lace-up leotard delivered and I had been saving a curly white wig for another snow queen shot (that hasn't happened yet)
I thought if I used my favourite white wall in the hallway I could stand a little distance away and not light it for a darker grey / another 'shade' of white.
Make-up went a bit crazy! I have been using a large pot of Snazaroo white face paint for a while and thought this would be a good time to use it all up. I painted half my face, from my hairline to just below my eyes completely white, fading to my skin tone.. and then from my jawline, down my neck and fading to skin just below my collarbones. As you'll see from the BTS pic, (left) & videos, it was super hard to draw a clean line on my jawline myself, so this had to be retouched in post. I had also bought some illuminating shimmery.. umm.. 'stuff' (it's actually called Unicorn Oil, Illuminating Glow Serum) but it looked rubbish on my lips where I wanted to try it, so I just used more facepaint.
Annoyingly, I still have some Snazaroo left in the pot; it's like the facepaint which keeps on giving.
I left my eyes completely devoid of eyeliner & mascara, and rubbed the white facepaint into my lashes.. not sure you're meant to do that, but I'm pleased to report they're still there 3 weeks later, so all good.


So as you can see, I set up a beauty dish quite high, without a grid but with the diffusion sock. I knew these shots were going to be 3/4 length, so it didn't matter about the light not reaching below my thighs, and the fall-off is nice I think. The dish was positioned far enough away from the wall and angled down towards me so no light, (at least very minimal) escaped to the background.
I've been using the 60mm lens loads recently.. just a really nice focal length for what I've been shooting.


Conveniently, there is a mirror on the wall opposite where I was standing for the shot so if I ever use the hallway white wall for photos, I can see what I'm doing in that mirror which is always helpful. You are never ever too good or too professional to use a mirror; it will pretty much always enable you to perfect every pose, especially when you are taking selfies and concentrating on about a million things at once.
I was pressing the remote shutter on the floor with my foot, which is just out of shot in these videos. Unfortunately after too many times leaving the receiver dangling from the camera, the lead is now broken but a replacement isn't expensive so I'll be getting another soon. I would connect the receiver to the camera and have the flash trigger on top, but for some reason there is no pass-through and the light fails to trigger.. so I leave the remote receiver dangling.

Initially, I was trying to incorporate as many different white things as possible, so I took a couple of white IKEA boxes and photographed them, (holding them in the light) separately to me. This was because a) I thought it might look cool if I photoshopped the second one balancing on a point on top of the first, b) even one box was too big to photograph with me in the photo as the space is tight and I have to position the canera to shoot through a doorway. The boxes were bigger than I remembered, so I had to make them significantly smaller in post too.
Looking back, I'm not sure why I used the boxes because they don't add any context to the photo whatsoever and now I don't even like that shot. I much prefer the shots without the boxes which is why I went back to Lightroom and retouched the other three..

Anyway, here are the results (please click on any photo to see it larger)
Settings: ISO 100, f7.1, 1/100th sec


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